The Letters of a Lineage
A full reading of Hasrizal Abdul Jamil's deep and recent ancestry, and the documented family story it quietly confirms.
One file, read for the ancestry it carries
Every reading that follows is drawn from a single file: the raw DNA data Hasrizal obtained from MyHeritage. It is worth understanding what that file is, because its character shapes what it can and cannot say.
Unlike the older microarray tests, which check a fixed shopping list of pre-chosen positions, this data comes from low-pass whole genome sequencing. The method reads lightly right across the genome rather than sampling a set menu, which is why it returns 584,898 markers spread over the autosomes and the X chromosome. The data is aligned to the standard build 37 human reference and reported on the forward strand, so it slots cleanly into the analysis tools used here.
One quiet detail confirms the obvious: every marker on the X chromosome returns a single-copy reading, the signature of one X and therefore of a male sample. Two absences matter more. The file holds no Y-chromosome and no mitochondrial data, which is a limit of what MyHeritage chose to release rather than a flaw in the sample, since sequencing of this kind physically reads both. What remains is a rich autosomal record, and it is from that record that the ancestry below is read.
A composition that reads, unmistakably, as Nusantara
MyHeritage version 2.5 estimates the recent ethnic mix by comparing the genome against present-day reference populations. The result places Hasrizal squarely in the maritime Malay world, with threads reaching across the seas that have always carried people through it.
- Indonesian and Malay52.1%
- Filipino24.7%
- Bengali14.5%
- Mainland South East Asian7.7%
- Central Asian1.0%
The largest share, just over half, is Indonesian and Malay, the heartland identity of the archipelago and the peninsula. The quarter that reads as Filipino is not a surprise but a confirmation of deep kinship: the Malay world and the Philippines are branches of the same Austronesian expansion, the great seafaring dispersal that settled island Southeast Asia, so the two populations share a great deal at the genetic level.
The Bengali and Mainland Southeast Asian components, together a little under a quarter, trace the long history of contact across the Bay of Bengal and down the mainland: centuries of trade, scholarship, migration and intermarriage that wove South Asia into the fabric of the archipelago long before modern borders. The faint Central Asian trace is a distant echo of those same overland and maritime networks. These are estimates rather than certainties, and they may shift as reference panels grow, but the shape of the picture is stable and clear.
The map of his ancestry and the map of the monsoon trade winds are very nearly the same map.
The deeper current beneath the recent mix
Where the ethnicity estimate compares against living populations, Ancient Origins reaches much further back, modelling the genome against ancient peoples reconstructed from DNA recovered from archaeological remains.
- Southeast Asian2000 BC – AD 180078.6%
- Indian SubcontinentAD 690 – 99020.8%
- Papuan400 – 200 BC0.6%
Nearly four-fifths resolves to a Southeast Asian source spanning roughly four thousand years, the Neolithic farming and Austronesian seafaring peoples who settled the region. The substantial fifth that reads as Indian Subcontinent, dated to the medieval centuries, reflects the long age of Indian Ocean exchange, when Hindu-Buddhist and later Islamic networks, the trading world of Srivijaya and its successors, bound South Asia and the archipelago closely together. The faint Papuan trace is a whisper of the older Melanesian substratum that underlies parts of island Southeast Asia.
Genetic fit 1.782 (Close)The "genetic fit" is simply a measure of how well the model accounts for the genome. A score in this range, marked Close, means the chosen ancient populations explain Hasrizal's DNA well, so the picture can be read with reasonable confidence rather than as a loose approximation.
Eighty per cent farmer, in the only sense that counts here
This breakdown estimates how much of the genome descends from ancient farming populations versus ancient foraging ones. Each label names a real archaeological people, defined by where and when they lived and how they fed themselves.
- Southeast Asian Neolithic Farmer80.6%
- Ancient Ancestral South Indian10.6%
- Zagros Neolithic Farmer4.8%
- South American Hunter-Gatherer2.6%
- Anatolian Neolithic Farmer0.8%
- Jomon Hunter-Gatherer0.4%
- Melanesian0.2%
The dominant component, the Southeast Asian Neolithic Farmer, is the farming population behind the spread of agriculture through the region. The Ancient Ancestral South Indian and Zagros Neolithic Farmer layers reflect, respectively, a deep South Asian foraging-derived stratum and the early farmers of the Near Eastern highlands whose ancestry travelled east over millennia. The remaining slivers, the South American, Anatolian, Jomon and Melanesian traces, are each well under three per cent and are best read as faint deep-time echoes or modelling noise rather than literal recent ancestry.
The word "farmer" here names an archaeological population, not a personality. It should not be confused with any "hunter versus farmer" temperament metaphor. The two share a word and nothing else, and a high "farmer" reading says only that Hasrizal descends largely from ancient farming peoples, which for a Malay person is exactly as expected.
The ethnicity estimate, as MyHeritage animates it
A short film tracing the same composition across the map of the region, region by region and thread by thread.
Where the genetics meets the genealogy
The genetic ancestry above does not float free. It sits atop a family tree documented across many generations, and the fit between the two is striking. The Nusantara base, the South Asian layer, the maritime kinship with the Philippines: all of it is the genetic shadow of a Malay genealogy that the paper record already tells in names and dates.
Two direct lines matter most, because they are precisely the ones the DNA could not name. The paternal line runs from Mohd Daud Pandak Tak down through Mohd Akib Mohd Daud and Abdul Jamil Mohd Akib to Hasrizal, a chain of fathers and sons that a Y-chromosome reading would trace exactly. The maternal line reaches back through Alang Saripah Teraju, who was born in 1875 and lived more than a century to 1980, into Sumatran descent, the very thread that a mitochondrial reading would follow.
The two lines the DNA could not name are the very ones the paper trail remembers best.
Paternal line
- Mohd Daud Pandak Tak
- Mohd Akib Mohd Daud (– 1968)
- Abdul Jamil Mohd Akib (1934 – 1992)
- Hasrizal Abdul Jamil (1975)
Maternal line
- Alang Saripah Teraju (1875 – 1980)
- Siti Rogayah Pandak Mohd Tak
- (maternal line, Sumatran descent)
- Hasrizal Abdul Jamil (1975)
The full documented tree, below, runs far wider than these two threads, gathering in the many branches of the Mohd Akib and Pandak Tak families across the generations.
Two lineages the data left unspoken
A haplogroup is a kind of ancient surname for a single thread of the family tree: a deep-ancestry label that places one direct line on the global map of human descent. There are two such lines. The paternal haplogroup, read from the Y chromosome, follows the male line of fathers and sons. The maternal haplogroup, read from mitochondrial DNA, follows the female line of mothers and daughters.
Neither could be assigned here, for the simple reason given at the outset: the MyHeritage export contains no Y-chromosome and no mitochondrial data. So the Pandak Tak male line and the Alang Saripah female line remain, for now, without their deep-time labels.
Recovering the haplogroups would place the two documented lines on the global human family tree, adding a layer of deep-time origin beneath the genealogy already recorded on paper.
Obtaining them would mean a specialist test. FamilyTreeDNA's Big Y and full mitochondrial sequence give the deepest resolution and are the natural choice for serious genealogical work. A lighter alternative is a test such as 23andMe or Living DNA, whose raw exports do include these markers and could be read directly to give at least a broad haplogroup for each line.